Gear

Maybe not the best shot, it was cloudy, cold and windy, and on self-timer ... but, this is it. The full test for my ride next week on the Heaphy.

Elected to do racks rather than a heavy backpack, there is over 1000m of climbing on 2 of the 4 days, and the chosen racks were Freeload. Awesome, but even then required a little modification due to bike geometry. On top of them, 20L dry bags with a total of around 8KG of gear. Food, clothes, sleeping bag etc. Yep, gone as lightweight as possible. Small backpack with water, bike parts etc.

So today, out into the mist and rain up Rapaki. I was interested in what an extra 8KG on the bike did to it. Certainly climbing was more work, but not as bad as I thought, and performance was better than expected to. Decided not to do a second climb, I'll save my energy for Friday!

An afternoon ahead of me packing. We're moving out of our house in just under 3 weeks for it to be repaired. And we have 13 years of cr*p to rationalise!